Pierre Laval

Pierre Laval (28 June 1883-15 October 1945) was Prime Minister of France from 27 January 1931 to 20 February 1932 (succeeding Theodore Steeg and preceding Andre Tardieu) and from 7 June 1935 to 24 January 1936 (succeeding Fernand Bouisson and preceding Albert Sarraut) and Chief of the Government of Vichy France from 11 July to 13 December 1940 (succeeding Philippe Petain and preceding Pierre Etienne Flandin) and from 18 April 1942 to 20 August 1944 (succeeding Petain). His collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II resulted in his execution in 1945.

Biography
Pierre Laval was born in Chateldon, Auvergne, France in 1883, and he became an advocate of the working classes as a law student and joined the SFIO in 1903. He became a parliamentary deputy in 1914, but was increasingly at odds with his party owing to his opposition to World War I. He was defeated at the polls in 1919, left the SFIO in 1920, but returned to the Chamber of Deputies as an independent in 1924, again representing the Parisian working-class district of Aubervilliers. After entering the Senate in 1927 he continued gradually to shift to the right, so that in his first period as Prime Minister he tried unsuccessfully to cope with an economic crisis through a rigid policy of deflation. In his second period in office, the Saarland voted to return to Germany, though he tried ot strengthen French security through a pact with the Soviet Union in 1935. He had to resign over his apparent condonation of Mussolini's conquests in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

Following the Fall of France in 1940, Laval was instrumental in convincing the National Assembly to give Marshal Philippe Petain full powers to revise the constitution of the French Third Republic. He fully supported Petain's desire to collaborate with Nazi Germany, and on 22 June 1942 announced his hope that Germany would win the war. He hoped to turn France into Germany's "favorite province", and thus to avoid direct German rule as had happened in Poland, though this hope was betrayed in late 1942 when Vichy France was occupied by German troops. Laval had been dismissed as Petain's Chief Minister in December 1940 owing to personality clashes with the marshal, but he had to be reinstated at German insistence in 1942. In 1945, he fled to Spain, but was handed over to Austria. The American occupying forces turned him over to France, where he was executed by firing squad after a short trial.